BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

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Sunday, January 31, 2021

“Faust” (post 2) by Goethe (post 4): Faust sees an alternate personality when he looks in a mirror, reflecting multiple personality trait in the author


Mirrors are a recurring subject in this blog, because it is known that persons with multiple personality may occasionally see one of their alternate personalities when they look in a mirror.


In fiction, this may be explained away by saying it is a “magic mirror.” But it would have made more sense for fiction to have had magical windows.


“FAUST. Who meanwhile has been standing in front of a mirror, going forward to peer into it from up close and then stepping back.

What do I see? What a marvelous vision

Shows itself in this magic glass!

Love, lend me your wings, your swiftest to pass

Through the air to the heaven she must dwell in!

Unless I stay firmly fixed to this spot,

If I dare to move nearer the least bit,

Mist blurs the vision and obscures her quite.

Woman unrivaled, beauty absolute!

Can such things be, a creature made perfectly?

The body so indolently stretched out there

Surely epitomizes all that is heavenly.

Can such a marvel inhabit down here?” (1, lines 2477-2490).


A magical mirror in fiction may reflect multiple personality trait in the writer. In the above example, it is not a problem that the alternate personality would be of a different sex and age than the character or writer, since alternate personalities are often of a different sex and age than the host personality.


1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Faust: A Tragedy, Parts One [1806/1829] & Two [1831], Fully Revised. Translated from the German by Martin Greenberg. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2014.

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